Vin­ode Mam­chan

West In­dies One Day In­ter­na­tion­al cap­tain Dwayne Bra­vo has been made skip­per of this coun­try's team for the up­com­ing Su­per50 at the Queen's Park Oval.

Bra­vo, who is cur­rent­ly on du­ty with the West In­dies team in New Zealand, takes over the helm from wick­et­keep­er/bats­man De­nesh Ramdin, who has been in charge since Daren Gan­ga was re­moved two years ago.

T&T Guardian un­der­stands that the T&T se­lec­tors made a rec­om­men­da­tion to the board to have Bra­vo in­stalled in the po­si­tion and when the mat­ter went around for con­sul­ta­tion–it was agreed that if he is West In­dies One Day In­ter­na­tion­al cap­tain then it is on­ly fit­ting that he is made cap­tain of the T&T team for the re­gion­al tour­na­ment. Ramdin led the team dur­ing the last Su­per50 tour­na­ment and T&T was knocked out at the se­mi-fi­nal stage by lit­tle fan­cied Com­bined Cam­pus­es and Col­leges (CCC) at Kens­ing­ton Oval in Bar­ba­dos.

Mean­while, chair­man of the se­lec­tion pan­el Alec Burns said the team will be se­lect­ed to­day. Orig­i­nal­ly the team was sup­posed to be se­lect­ed on Sat­ur­day but the se­lec­tors want­ed to take a longer look at the play­ers.

Burns said the play­ers were com­ing along nice­ly and hope­ful­ly they will be in good shape when the tour­na­ment bowls off at the end of this month. "We as se­lec­tors are hap­py that the guys are mov­ing in a pos­i­tive di­rec­tion. Look­ing on at the tri­als on the week­end, we saw one team be­ing bowled out for 63 and the oth­er re­ply­ing with a lit­tle bit as well. We had to take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion that the pitch had too much mois­ture in it and af­ter this dried out some guys cashed in and made runs. We had a cen­tu­ry from Evin Lewis and a good 72 from Ja­son Mo­hammed.

"What was im­por­tant was the fact that the guys dur­ing the sec­ond in­nings looked as if they want­ed to bat for long and this has been our prob­lem in the past. We have not been bat­ting out our 50 overs and this has af­fect­ed our re­sults.

"There is an­oth­er three-day match start­ing on Fri­day at the Na­tion­al Crick­et Cen­tre (NCC) and this will be fol­lowed by two 50 overs match­es on Jan­u­ary 22 and 25. On the 26th some of the play­ers se­lect­ed will be giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to play in the Na­tion­al league which gets go­ing and af­ter this they go in­to camp. So there is a lot of crick­et to be played be­fore the tour­na­ment starts and hope­ful­ly the guys that are se­lect­ed will make the best of the op­por­tu­ni­ties pro­vid­ed to them to get in­to top shape for the tour­na­ment."